The "Transcendentalists" were a number
of young Americans, most of them born into the Unitarianism of
New England in the early nineteenth century, who in the 1830's
became excited, or rather intoxicated, by the new literature of
England and of the Continent (and also by a cursory introduction
to that of the orient), and who thereupon revolted against the
rationalism of their fathers. Perhaps "revolted" is
a bit too strong: though they said scornful things in Emerson's
phrase, about "the corpse­cold Unitarianism of Harvard
College and Brattle Street," they owed much to the liberalism
of the creed they outgrew. More accurately, then, they may be
defined in a somewhat wider perspective as children of the Puritan
past who, having been emancipated by Unitarianism from New England's
original Calvinism, found a new religious expression in forms
derived from romantic literature and from the philosophical idealism
of Germany.

They never constituted any organized movement- as
we see Emerson making clear-but there were enough of them, and
they came so spontaneously and vocally to their coincident persuasions,
and their activities ( some of these a bit antic) seemed so to
fit into a pattern, that outsiders could accuse them of being
a "movement," in fact, of being a conspiracy. So, enlarging
our perspective still further, we may also see in the Transcendentalists
not so much a collection of exotic ideologues as the first outcry
of the heart against the materialistic pressures of a business
civilization. Protestant to the core, they turn their protest
against what is customarily called the "Protestant ethic":
they refuse to labor in a proper calling, conscientiously cultivate
the arts of leisure, and strive to avoid making money.

By now almost asmuch has been written about
the New England Transcendentalists as they ever wrote by themselves.
They attract attention not only because they do occupy a place
in our intellectual history but even more because they speak for
an important mood in the spiritual life of the Republic-a mood
that has subsequently become, periodically, vocal. Provincial
they no doubt were, and often ludicrous in their high seriousness;
even so, they are what we have to display as an American counterpart
to the ebullient Romanticism of Europe.

Beyond doubt, an anthology of the basic texts of
Transcendentalism would perforce include Ralph Waldo Emerson's
little book of 1836, Nature, his two seminal orations -"The
American Scholar" of 1837 and "The Divinity School Address"
of 1838-and several of his classic Essays -"Self­Reliance,"
"The over­Soul," "Fate," "Experience."
Also it should contain a good portion of, or all of, Henry Thoreau's
Walden, and probably his most formidable declaration, that
which assisted Gandhi in the fight for Indian independence, "Civil
Disobedience."

All these, however, are omitted from this collection.
In the first place, if I reprinted them, I should have little
or no space for exhibiting the wider or more ordinary aspects
of the phenomenon. In the second place, these texts are monotonously
provided in all the current anthologies of American Literature.
Thirdly, as for Walden, an effort to wrench portions of
that intensely unified volume out of its context is simply to
desecrate it; there is no point in anybody's reading any of it
unless he reads the whole. And finally, presuming those works
to be prerequisite to this compilation, I seek to present the
atmosphere of the Transcendental period rather than a systematic
ordering of the ideas. This endeavor is the more legitimate because
the Transcendentalists were in fact the children of an atmosphere,
in which they breathed rather than acquired ideas, and were not
at all proponents of any systematic logic.

This volume is an offshoot of a more comprehensive
anthology, The Transcendentalists, which I published through
the Harvard University Press in 1950. Therein I traced the long
argument over the historicity of the New Testament miracles, from
its beginnings around 1830 to its culmination in Theodore Parker's
"Transient and Permanent" in 1841. In the main, the
preliminary debate is fairly technical; in any event, the development
is summed up in Parker's magnificent "Discourse," which
I now reprint entire.

So, this may be called an off­center collection
of the material, designed to illustrate its range, to exemplify
the variety, to set forth the general frame of mind and temper.
I hope that the result has at least the virtue of readability.
Apart from some three or four acknowledged contributions to "world
literature," the ardent band left an impressive record. To
read the writings of Transcendentalists with some degree of sympathy,
one must in a certain measure put himself in rapport with the
attitude that was fundamental to them all. Thoreau may be taken
as expressing it most succinctly:

There is no ripeness which is not, so to speak,
something ultimate in itself, and not merely a perfected means
to a higher end. In order to be ripe it must serve a transcendent
use. The ripeness of a leaf, being perfected, leaves the tree
at that point and never returns to it. It has nothing to do with
any other fruit which the tree may bear, and only the genius of
the poet can pluck it.

My volume is, of course, no more than a poetic sampling,
but if it be a fair selection of the leaves I need not concern
myself about the fruits. (The arch­Transcendentalist of New
York made the point even more explicit: he called his creation
Leaves of Grass.) Thus it may, I trust, convey a sense
of what was an excitement, an exhilaration, m the course of which
a few bold American spirits made a gallant effort to introduce
this mercantile and pragmaticnation to some of the deeper
currents in the intellectual life of the West-and of the East.

THE ESSENTIAL

TRANSCENDENTALIST

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1817­1862

[We may as well go at once, and rudely, to the heart
of the matter. For this purpose, no introducer is more qualified
to serve than Henry Thoreau, especially for the rudeness. Supposedly
he was inducted into the faith by his patron Emerson, and learned
the doctrines either from Emerson or from the books to which Emerson
led him; yet all his adult life he fought furiously, in the best
Transcendental spirit, to maintain his independence, and applied
himself to working away from abstract doctrine toward passionate
appropriation of the concrete, the specific-the particular muskrat
and the individual painted tortoise. Yet when challenged by the
outside world-the conventional world of empirical and inductive
science-to explain what sort of naturalist he considered himself,
he exploded (in the resonant privacy of his Journal) with
a defiant burstof what, in one form or another, was the
rebellious intransigence in the heart of all participants in the
"Movement."]

JOURNAL

March 5 [1853].... The
secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Science requests
me, as he probably has thousands of others, by a printed circular
letter from Washington the other day, to fill the blank against
certain questions, among which the most important one was what
branch of science I was especially interested in, using the term
science in the most comprehensive sense possible. Now, though
I could state to a select few that department of human inquiry
which engages me, and should be rejoiced at an opportunity to
do so, I felt that it would be to make myself the laughing­stock
of the scientific community to describe or to attempt to describe
to them that branch of science which specially interests me, inasmuch
as they do not believe in a science which deals with the higher
law. So I was obliged to speak to their condition and describe
to them that poor part of me which alone they can understand.
The fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural
philosopher to boot. Now I think of it, I should have told them
at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the
shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my
explanations.

How absurd that, though I probably stand as near
to nature as any of them, and am by constitution as good an observer
as most, yet a true account of my relation to nature should excite
their ridicule only! If it had been the secretary of an association
of which Plato or Aristotle was the president, I should not have
hesitated to describe my studies at once and particularly.

HISTORY AND DOCTRINE

1. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 18o3­l88e2

[No modern historian can compose, nor should any
student require, a better or more subtle account of the phenomenon
that got itself called ''Transcendentalism'' than the lecture
Emerson gave in 1880 to the Concord Lyceum-his hundredth before
that body. His mind was then dissolving into benign vagueness,
but the address was pieced together, with the help of a secretary
and his daughter, out of older jottings ( mostly from the year
1867); hence it still exudes that sense of freshness and excitement,
combined with a cool, ironic appreciation of the fugitive character
of the outburst, which from the beginning was Emerson's peculiar
qualification for becoming and remaining its foremost spokesman.

In the portion here omitted he rather casually surveys
the communistic enterprise at Brook Farm (l840­l846), which
he declined to join-to the immense grief of George Ripley, its
leading spirit, and of those who with Ripley felt that Transcendental
premises should lead toward some such social action. Emerson's
account therefore concentrates defensively upon that theme in
the preaching of the band which he, by force of eloquence and
example, made predominant: a full reliance upon self by the atomic
and self­sufficing individual. Spatial limitations prevent
a fair representation in this volume of the socialistic Transcendentalists
(few of whom wrote with much distinction), but as to what the
brotherhood (and sisterhood) fundamentally was, as to what ideas
excited them and brought them together, Emerson's history is the
most revealing of all witnesses.

William Ellery Channing (l780­l842) was the
intellectual leader of those churches which by the 1820's formed
the Unitarian Association; more daring and idealistic than his
theological colleagues, he was revered by the young insurgents,
and Emerson called him "our bishop." However, when he
belatedly realized to what lengths these youths were carrying
their revolt against the sensational psychology of John Locke,
upon which Unitarian theology was founded-that they were proclaiming
the radical notion that innate ideas "transcend" all
sense experience- he drew back in horror.

Edward Everett (1794­1865) studied in Germany
and brought back in 1819 a facile acquaintance with German scholarship;
he quickly developed an oratorical brilliance that led him to
a variegated career as statesman and diplomat. Nathaniel L. Frothingham
(1793­1870), minister at the First Church of Boston, was
a scholar of vast erudition who never had much sympathy for Transcendentalism.
Andrews Norton (1786­1853), a scholar of still more massive
erudition, as Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature in the Harvard
Divinity School, constituted himself the most virulent Unitarian
opponent of the Transcendentalists and in 1839 stigmatized Emerson's
"Divinity School Address" and all like­minded utterances
as "The Latest Form of Infidelity."

The first meeting of the Transcendental Club, described
on pp. 13­14, was in 1836. It met irregularly for five or
six years thereafter. The "pure idealist" at the end
of the paragraph is Alcott.

To the published form of this address Emerson prefixed
a gnomic verse (as he did to most of his essays) which just possibly
says a bit more than he intended, though perhaps when he composed
it (presumably in 1867) he really meant it as a mildly humorous
yet precise characterization of thegroup:

For Joy and Beauty planted it

With faerie gardens cheered,

And boding Fancy haunted it

With men and women weird.]

HISTORIC NOTES OF LIFE AND LETTERS IN NEW
ENGLAND

The ancient manners were giving way. There grew a
certain tenderness on the people, not before remarked. Children
had been repressed and kept in the background; now they were considered,
cosseted and pampered. I recall the remark of a witty physician
who remembered the hardships of his own youth; he said, "It
was a misfortune to have been born when children were nothing,
and to live till men were nothing."

There are always two parties, the party of the Past
and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement.
At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the
world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and
social customs. It is not easy to date these eras of activity
with any precision, but in this region one made itself remarked,
say in 1820 and the twenty years following.

It seemed a war between intellect and affection;
a crack in Nature, which split every church in Christendom into
Papal and Protestant; Calvinism into old and New schools; Quakerism
into old and New; brought new divisions in politics; as the new
conscience touching temperance and slavery. The key to the period
appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew
reflective and intellectual There was a new consciousness. The
former generations acted under the belief that a shining social
prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly
the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed That the nation
existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education
of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national
movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision;
the individual is the world.

This perception is a sword such as was never drawn
before. It divides and detaches bone and marrow, soul and body,
yea, almost the man from himself. It is the age of severance,
of dissociation, of freedom. of analysis. of detachment. Every
man for himself. The public speaker disclaims speaking for any
other; he answers only for himself. The social sentiments are
weak; the sentiment of patriotism is weak; veneration is low;
the natural affections feebler than they were. People grow philosophical
about native land and parents and relations. There is an universal
resistance to ties and ligaments once supposed essential to civil
society. The new race is stiff, heady and rebellious. they are
fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks,
hierarchies, governors, yea, almost laws. They have a neck of
unspeakable tenderness; it winces at a hair. They rebel against
theological as against political dogmas against mediation, or
saints, or any nobility in the unseen.

The age tends to solitude. The association of the
time is accidental and momentary and hypocritical, the detachment
intrinsic and progressive. The association is for power, merely-for
means; the end being the enlargement and independency of the individual.
Anciently, society was in thecourse of things. There was
a Sacred Band, a Theban Phalanx.There can be none now.
College classes, military corps, or trades­unions may fancy
themselves indissoluble for amoment, over their wine;
but it is a painted hoop, and has no girth. The age of arithmetic
and of criticism has set in. The structures of old faith in every
department of society a few centuries have sufficed to destroy.
Astrology, magic, palmistry, are long gone. The very last ghost
is laid. Demonology is on its last legs. Prerogative, government,
goes to pieces day by day. Europe is strewn with wrecks; a constitution
once a week. In social manners and morals the revolution is just
as evident. In the law courts, crimes of fraud have taken the
place of crimes of force. The stockholder has stepped into the
place of the warlike baron. The nobles shall not any longer, as
feudal lords, have power of life and death over the churls, but
now, in another shape, as capitalists, shall in all love and peace
eat them up as before. Nay, government itself becomes the resort
of those whom government was invented to restrain. "Are there
any brigands on the road?" inquired the traveller in France.
"oh, no, set your heart at rest on that point," said
the landlord; "what should these fellows keep the highway
for, when they can rob just as effectually, and much more at their
ease, in the bureaus of office?"

In literature the effect appeared in the decided
tendency of criticism. The most remarkable literary work of the
age has for its hero and subject precisely this introversion:
I mean the poem of Faust. In philosophy, Immanuel Kant
has made the best catalogue of the humanfaculties and
the best analysis of the mind. Hegel also especially. In science
the French savant, exact, pitiless, with barometer, crucible,
chemic test and calculus in hand, travels into all nooks and islands,
to weigh, to analyze and report. And chemistry. which is the analysis
of matter, has taught us that we eat gas, drink gas, tread on
gas, and are gas. The same decomposition has changed the whole
face of physics; the like in all arts, modes. Authority falls,
in Church, College, Courts of Law, Faculties, medicine. Experiment
is credible; antiquity is grown ridiculous.

It marked itself by a certain predominance of the
intellect in the balance of powers. The warm swart Earth­spirit
which made the strength of past ages, mightier than it knew, with
instincts instead of science, like a mother yielding food from
her own breast instead of preparing it through chemic and culinary
skill-warm negro ages of sentiment and vegetation-all gone; another
hour had struck and other forms arose. Instead of the social existence
which all shared, was now separation. Every one for himself; driven
to find all his resources, hopes, rewards, society and deity within
himself.

The young men were born with knives in their brain,
a tendency to introversion, se­if­dissection, anatomizing
of motives. The popular many severe shocks from the new times;
from the Armenians, which was the current name of the backsliders
from Calvinism, sixty years ago; then from the English philosophic
theologians, Hartley and Priestley and Belsham, the followers
of Locke. and then I should say much later from the slow but extraordinary
influence of Swedenborg; a man of prodigious mind, though as I
think tainted with a certain suspicion of insanity, and therefore
generally disowned, but exerting a singular power over an important
intellectual class; then the powerful influence of the genius
and character of Dr. Channing.

Germany had created criticism in vain for us until
1820 when Edward Everett returned from his five years in Europe,
and brought to Cambridge his rich results, which no one was so
fitted by natural grace and the splendor of his rhetoric to introduce
and recommend. He made us for the first time acquainted with Wolff's
theory of the Homeric writings, with the criticism of Heyne. The
novelty of the learning lost nothing in the skill and genius of
his relation, and the rudest undergraduate found a new morning
opened to him in the lecture­room of Harvard Hall.

There was an influence on the young people from the
genius of Everett which was almost comparable to that of Pericles
in Athens. He had an inspiration which did not go beyond his head,
but which made him the master of elegance. If any of my readers
were at that period in Boston or Cambridge, they will easily remember
his radiant beauty of person, of a classic style, his heavy large
eye, marble lids, which gave the impression of mass which the
slightness of his form needed; sculptured lips; a voice of such
rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance, that, although
slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beautiful and correct
of all the instruments of the time. The word that he spoke, in
the manner in which he spoke it, became current and classical
in New England. He had a great talent for collecting facts, and
for bringing those he had to bear with ingenious felicity on the
topic of the moment. Let him rise to speak on what occasion soever,
a fact had always just transpired which composed, with some other
fact well known to the audience, the most pregnant and happy coincidence.
It was remarked that for a man who threw out so many facts he
was seldom convicted of a blunder. He had a good deal of special
learning, and all his learning was available for purposes of the
hour. It was all new learning, that wonderfully took and stimulated
the young men. It was so coldly and weightily communicated from
so commanding a platform, as if in the consciousness and consideration
of all history and all learning-adorned with so many simple and
austere beauties of expression, and enriched with so many excellent
digressions and significant quotations, that, though nothing could
be conceived beforehand less attractive or indeed less fit for
green boys from Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts,
with their unripe Latin and Greek reading, than exegetical discourses
in the style of Voss and Wolff and Ruhnken, on the Orphic and
Ante­Homeric remains-yet this learning instantly took the
highest place to our imagination in our unoccupied American Parnassus.
All his auditors felt the extreme beauty and dignity of the manner,
and even the coarsest were contented to go punctually to listen,
for the manner, when they had found out that the subject matter
was not for them. In the lecture­room, he abstained from
all ornament, and pleased himself with the play of detailing erudition
in a style of perfect simplicity. In the pulpit (for he was then
a clergyman) he made amends to himself and his auditor for the
self­denial of the professor's chair, and, with an infantine
simplicity still, of manner, he gave the reins to his florid,
quaint and affluent fancy.

Then was exhibited all the richness of a rhetoric
which we have never seen rivaled in this country. Wonderful how
memorable were words made which were only pleasing pictures, and
covered no new or valid thoughts. He abounded in sentences, in
wit, in satire, in splendid allusion, in quotation impossible
to forget, in daring imagery, in parable and even in a sort of
defying experiment of his own wit and skill in giving an oracular
weight to Hebrew or Rabbinical words-feats which no man could
better accomplish, such was his self­command and the security
of his manner. All his speech was music, and with such variety
and invention that the ear was never tired. Especially beautiful
were his poetic quotations. He delighted in quoting Milton, and
with such sweet modulation that he seemed to give as much beauty
as he borrowed; and whatever he has quoted will be remembered
by any who heard him, with inseparable association with his voice
and genius. He had nothing in common with vulgarity and infirmity,
but, speaking, walking, sitting, was as much aloof and uncommon
as a star. The smallest anecdote of his behavior or conversation
was eagerly caught and repeated, and every young scholar could
recite brilliant sentences from his sermons, with mimicry, good
or bad, of his voice. This influence went much farther, for he
who was heard with such throbbing hearts and sparkling eyes in
the lighted and crowded churches, did not let go his hearers when
the church was dismissed, but the bright image of that eloquent
form followed the boy home to his bedchamber; and not a sentence
was written in academic exercises, not a declamation attempted
in the college chapel, but showed the omnipresence of his genius
to youthful heads. This made every youth his defender, and boys
filled their mouths with arguments to prove that the orator had
a heart. This was a triumph of Rhetoric. It was not the intellectual
or the moral principles which he had to teach. It was not thoughts.
When Massachusetts was full of his fame it was not contended that
he had thrown any truths into circulation. But his power lay in
the magic of form; it was in the graces of manner; in a new perception
of Grecian beauty, to which he had opened our eyes. There was
that finish about this person which is about women, and which
distinguishes every piece of genius from the works of talent-that
these last are more or less matured in every degree of completeness
according to the time bestowed on them, but works of genius in
their first and slightest form are still wholes. In every public
discourse there was nothing left for the indulgence of his hearer,
no marks of late hours and anxious, unfinished study, but the
goddess of grace had breathed on the work alast fragrancyand glitter.

By a series of lectures largely and fashionably attended
for two winters in Boston he made a beginning of popular literary
and miscellaneous lecturing, which in that region at least had
important results. It is acquiring greater importance every day,
and becoming a national institution. I am quite certain that this
purely literary influence was of the first importance to the American
mind.

In the pulpit Dr. Frothingham, an excellent classical
and German scholar, had already made us acquainted, if prudently,
with the genius of Eichhorn's theologic criticism. And Professor
Norton a little later gave form and method to the like studies
in the then infant Divinity School. But I think the paramount
source of the religious revolution was Modern Science; beginning
with Copernicus, who destroyed the pagan fictions of the Church,
by showing mankind that the earth on which we live was not the
centre of the Universe, around which the sun and stars revolved
every day, and thus fitted to be the platform on which the Drama
of the Divine Judgment was played before the assembled Angels
of Heaven-"the scaffold of the divine vengeance" Saurin
called it-but a little scrap of a planet, rushing round the sun
in our system, which in turn was too minute to be seen at the
distance of many stars which we behold. Astronomy taught us our
insignificance in Nature; showed that our sacred as our profane
history had been written in gross ignorance of the laws, which
were far grander than we knew; and compelled a certain extension
and uplifting of our views of the Deity and his Providence. This
correction of our superstitions was confirmed by the new science
of Geology, and the whole train of discoveries in every department.
But we presently saw also that the religious nature in man was
not affected by these errors m his understanding. The religious
sentiment made nothing of bulk or size, or far or near; triumphed
over time as well as space; and every lesson of humility, or justice,
or charity, which the old ignorant saints had taught him, was
still forever true.

Whether from these influences, or whether by a reaction
of the general mind against the too formal science, religion and
social life of the earlier period-there was, in the first quarter
of our nineteenth century, a certain sharpness of criticism, an
eagerness for reform, which showed itself in every quarter. It
appeared in the popularity of Lavater's Physiognomy, now almost
forgotten. Gall and Spurzheim's Phrenology laid a rough hand on
the mysteries of animal and spiritual nature, dragging down every
sacred secret to a street show. The attempt was coarse and odious
to scientific men, but had a certain truth in it; it felt connection
where the professors denied it, and was a leading to a truth which
had not yet been announced. on the heels of this intruder came
Mesmerism, which broke into the inmost shrines, attempted the
explanation of miracle and prophecy, as well as of creation. What
could be more revolting to the contemplative philosopher! But
a certain success attended it, against all expectation. It was
human, it was genial, itaffirmed unity and connection
between remote points, and as such was excellent criticism on
the narrow and dead classification of what passed for science;
and the joy with which it was greeted was an instinct of the people
which no true philosopher would fail to profit by. But while society
remained in doubt between the indignation of the old school and
the audacity of the new, a higher note sounded.Unexpected
aid from high quarters came to iconoclasts. The German poet Goethe
revolted against the science of the day, against French and English
science, declared war against the great name of Newton proposed
his own new and simple optics; in Botany, his simple theory of
metamorphosis-the eye of a leaf is all; every part of the plant
from root to fruit is only a modified leaf, the branch of a tree
is nothing but a leaf whose serratures have become twigs. He extended
this into anatomy and animal life, and his views were accepted.
The revolt became a revolution. Schelling and Oken introduced
their ideal natural philosophy, Hegel his metaphysics, and extended
it to Civil History.

The result in literature and the general mind was
a return to law; in science, in politics, in social life; as distinguished
from the profligate manners and politics of earlier times. The
age was moral. Every immorality is a departure from nature, and
is punished by natural loss and deformity. The popularity of Combe's
Constitution of Man; the humanity which was the aim of all the
multitudinous works of Dickens; the tendency even of Punch's caricature,
was all on the side of the people. There was a breath of new air,
much vague expectation, a consciousness of power not yet finding
its determinate aim.

I attribute much importance to two papers of Dr.
Channing, one on Milton and one on Napoleon, which were the first
specimens in this country of that large criticism which in England
had given power and fame to the Edinburgh Review. They were widely
read, and of course immediately fruitful in provoking emulation
which lifted the style of Journalism. Dr. Channing, whilst he
lived, was the star of the American Church, and we then thought,
if we do not still think, that he left no successor in the pulpit.
He could never be reported, for his eye and voice could not be
printed, and his discourses lose their best in losing them. He
was made for the public; his cold temperament made him the most
unprofitable private companion; but all America would have been
impoverished in wanting him. We could not then spare a single
word he uttered in public, not so much as the reading a lesson
in Scripture, or a hymn, and it is curious that his printed writings
are almost a history of the times; as there was no great public
interest, political, literary or even economical (for he wrote
on the Tariff), on which he did not leave some printed record
of his brave and thoughtful opinion. A poor little invalid all
his life, he is yet one of those men who vindicate the power of
the American race to produce greatness.

Dr. Channing took counsel in 1834 with George Ripley,
to the point whether it were possible to bring cultivated, thoughtful
people together, and make society that deserved the name. He had
earlier talked with Dr. John Collins Warren on the like purpose,
who admitted the wisdom of the design and undertook to aid him
in making the experiment. Dr. Channing repaired to Dr. Warren's
house on the appointed evening, with large thoughts which he wished
to open. He found a well­chosen assembly of gentlemen variously
distinguished; there was mutual greeting and introduction, and
they were chatting agreeably on indifferent matters and drawing
gently towards their great expectation, when a side­door
opened, the wholecompany streamed in to an oyster supper,
crowned by excellent wines; and so ended the first attempt to
establish aesthetic society in Boston.

Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind
to Mr. and Mrs. Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited
party of ladies and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present.
Though I recall the fact, I do not retain any instant consequence
of this attempt, or any connection between it and the new zeal
of the friends who at that time began to be drawn together by
sympathy of studies and of aspiration. Margaret Fuller, George
Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr. Brownson,
James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing and many others, gradually
drew together and from time to time spent an afternoon at each
other's houses in a serious conversation. With them was always
one well known form, a pure idealist, not at all a man of letters,
nor of any practical talent, nor a writer of books; a man quite
too cold and contemplative for the alliances of friendship, with
rare simplicity and grandeur of perception, who read Plato as
an equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they
were intellectual- whilst the men of talent complained of the
want of point and precision in this abstract and religious thinker.

These fine conversations, of course, were incomprehensible
to some in the company, and they had their revenge in their little
joke. one declared that "It seemed to him like going to heaven
in a swing;" another reported that, at a knotty point in
the discourse, a sympathizing Englishman with squeaking voice
interrupted with the question, "Mr. Alcott, a lady near me
desires to inquire whether omnipotence abnegates attribute?"

I think there prevailed at that time a general belief
in Boston that there was some concert of doctrinaires to
establish certain opinions and inaugurate some movement in literature,
philosophy and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators
were quite innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and
there two or three men or women who read and wrote, each alone,
with unusual vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen
upon Coleridge and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with
pleasure and sympathy. otherwise, their education and reading
were not marked, but had the American superficialness, and their
studies were solitary. I suppose all of them were surprised at
this rumor of a school or sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism,
given nobody knows by whom, or when it was first applied. As these
persons became in the common chances of society acquainted with
each other, there resulted certainly strong friendships, which
of course were exclusive in proportion to their heat: and perhaps
those persons who were mutually the best friends were the most
private and had no ambition of publishing their letters, diaries
or conversation.

From that time meetings were held for conversation,
with very little form, from house to house, of people engaged
in studies, fond of books, and watchful of all the intellectual
light from whatever quarter it flowed. Nothing could be less formal,
yet the intelligence and character and varied ability of the company
gave it some notoriety and perhaps waked curiosity as to its aims
and results.

Nothing more serious came of it than the modest quarterly
journal called The Dial, which, under the editorship of
Margaret Fuller, and later of some other, enjoyed its obscurity
for four years. All its papers were unpaid contributions, and
it was rather a work of friendship among the narrow circle of
students than the organ of any party. Perhaps its writers were
its chief readers: yet it contained some noble papers by Margaret
Fuller, and some numbers had an instant exhausting sale, because
of papers by Theodore Parker.

Theodore Parker was our Savonarola, an excellent
scholar, in frank and affectionate communication with the best
minds of his day, yet the tribune of the people, and the stout
Reformer to urge and defend every cause of humanity with and for
the humblest of mankind. He was no artist. Highly refined persons
might easily miss in him the element of beauty. What he said was
mere fact, almost offended you, so bald and detached; little cared
he. He stood altogether for practical truth; and so to the last.
He used every day and hour of his short life, and his character
appeared in the last moments with the same firm control as in
the midday of strength. I habitually apply to him the words of
a French philosopher who speaks of "the man of Nature who
abominates the steam­engine and the factory. His vast lungs
breathe independence with the air of the mountains and the woods."

The vulgar politician disposed of this circle cheaply
as "the sentimental class." State Street had an instinct
that they invalidated contracts and threatened the stability of
stocks; and it did not fancy brusque manners. Society always values,
even in its teachers, inoffensive people, susceptible of conventional
polish. The clergyman who would live in the city may have piety,
but must have taste, whilst there was often coming, among these,
some John the Baptist, wild from the woods, rude, hairy, careless
of dress and quite scornful of the etiquette of cities. There
was a pilgrim in those days walking in the country who stopped
at every door where he hoped to find hearing for his doctrine,
which was, Never to give or receive money. He was a poor printer,
and explained with simple warmth the belief of himself and five
or six young men with whom he agreed in opinion, of the vast mischief
of our insidious coin. He thought every one should labor at some
necessary product, and as soon as he had made more than enough
for himself, were it corn, or paper, or cloth, or boot­jacks,
he should give of the commodity to any applicant, and in turn
go to his neighbor for any article which he had to spare. of course
we were curious to know how he sped in his experiments on the
neighbor, and his anecdotes were interesting, and often highly
creditable. But he had the courage which so stern a return to
Arcadian manners required, and had learned to sleep, in cold nights,
when the farmer at whose door he knocked declined to give him
a bed, on a wagon covered with the buffalo­robe under the
shed-or under the stars, when the farmer denied the shed and the
buffalo­robe. I think he persisted for two years in his brave
practice, but did not enlarge his church of believers.

These reformers were a new class. Instead of the
fiery souls of the Puritans, bent on hanging the Quaker, burning
the witch and banishing the Romanist, these were gentle souls,
with peaceful and even with genial dispositions, casting sheep's­eyes
even on Fourier and his houris. It was a time when the air was
full of reform. Robert Owen of Lanark came hither from England
in 1845, and read lectures or held conversations wherever he found
listeners; the most amiable, sanguine and candid of men. He had
not the least doubt that he had hit on a right and perfect socialism,
or that all mankind would adopt it. He was then seventy years
old, and being asked, "Well, Mr. Owen, who is your disciple?
How many men are there possessed of your views who will remain
after you are gone, to put them in practice?" "Not one,"
was his reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier in his old age. He said
that Fourier learned of him all the truth he had; the rest of
his system was imagination, and the imagination of a banker. Owen
made the best impression by his rare benevolence. His love of
men made us forget his "Three Errors." His charitable
construction of men and their actions was invariable. He was the
better Christian in his controversy with Christians, and he interpreted
with great generosity the acts of the "Holy Alliance,"
and Prince Metternich, with whom the persevering doctrinaire
had obtained interviews; "Ah," he said, "you
may depend on it there are as tender hearts and as much good will
to serve men, in palaces, as in colleges."

And truly I honor the generous ideas of the Socialists,
the magnificence of their theories and the enthusiasm with which
they have been urged. They appeared the inspired men of their
time. Mr. Owen preached his doctrine of labor and reward, with
the fidelity and devotion of a saint, to the slow ears of his
generation. Fourier, almost as wonderful an example of the mathematical
mind of France as La Place or Napoleon, turned a truly vast arithmetic
to the question of social misery, and has put men under the obligation
which a generous mind always confers, of conceiving magnificent
hopes and making great demands as the right of man. He took his
measure of that which all should and might enjoy, from no soup­society
or charityconcert, but from the refinements of palaces, the wealth
of universities and the triumphs of artists. He thought nobly.
A man is entitled to pure air, and to the air of good conversation
in his bringing up, and not, as we or so many of us, to the poor­smell
and musty chambers, cats and fools.~ourier carried a whole French
Revolution in his head, and much more. Here was arithmetic on
a huge scale. His ciphering goes where ciphering never went before,
namely, into stars, atmospheres and animals, and men and women,
and classes of every character. It was the most entertaining of
French romances, and could not but suggest vast possibilities
of reform to the coldest and least sanguine....

There is of course to every theory a tendency to
run to an extreme, and to forget the limitations. In our free
institutions, where every man is at liberty to choose his home
and his trade, and all possible modes of working and gaining are
open to him, fortunes are easily made by thousands, as in no other
country. Then property proves too much for the man, and the men
of science, art, intellect, are pretty sure to degenerate into
selfish housekeepers, dependent on wine, coffee, furnace­heat,
gas­light and fine furniture. Then instantly things swing
the other way, and we suddenly find that civilization crowed too
soon; that what we bragged as triumphs were treacheries: that
we have opened the wrong door and let the enemy into the castle;
that civilization was a mistake; that nothing is so vulgar as
a great warehouse of room full of furniture and trumpery; that,
in the circumstances, the best wisdom were an auction or a fire.
Since the foxes and the birds have the right of it, with a warm
hole to keep out the weather, and no more-a pent­house to
fend the sun and ram is the house which lays no tax on the owner's
time and thoughts, and which he can leave, when the sun is warm,
and defy the robber. This was Thoreau's doctrine, who said that
the Fourierists had a sense of duty which led them to devote themselves
to their second­best. And Thoreau gave in flesh and blood
and pertinacious Saxon belief the purest ethics. He was more real
and practically believing in them than any of his company, and
fortified you at all times with an affirmative experience whichrefused to be set aside. Thoreau was in his own person a practical
answer, almost a refutation,to the theories of
the socialists. He required no Phalanx, no Government, no society,
almost no memory. He lived extempore from hour to hour, like
the birds and the angels; brought every day a new proposition,
as revolutionary as that of yesterday, but different: the only
man of leisure in his town; and his independence made all others
look like slaves. He was a good Abbot Samson, and carried a counsel
in his breast. "Again and again I congratulate myself on
my so­called poverty, I could not overstate this advantage."
"What you call bareness and poverty, is to me simplicity.
God could not be unkind to me if he should try. I love best to
have each thing in its season only, and enjoy doing without it
at all other times. It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy
no advantage at all. I have never got over my surprise that I
should have been born into the most estimable place in all the
world, and in the very nick of time too." There's an optimist
far you.

I regard these philanthropists as themselves the
effects of the age in which we live, and, in common with so many
other good facts, the efflorescence of the period, and predicting
a good fruit that ripens. They were not the creators they believed
themselves, but they were unconscious prophets of a true state
of society; one which the tendencies of nature lead unto, one
which always establishes itself for the sane soul, though not
in that manner in which they paint it; but they were describers
of that which is really being done. The large cities are phalansteries;
and the theorists drew all their argument from facts already taking
place in our experience. The cheap way is to make every man do
what he was born for. one merchant to whom I described the Fourierproject, thought it must not onlysucceed, but that
agricultural association must presently fix the price of bread,
and drive single farmers into association in self­defence,
as the great commercial and manufacturing companies had done.
Society in England andin America is trying the experiment
again in small pieces, in cooperative associations, in cheap eating­houses,
as well as in the economies of club­houses and in cheap reading
rooms.

It chanced that here in one family were two brothers,
one a brilliant and fertile inventor, and close by him his own
brother, a man of business who knew how to direct his faculty
and make it instantly and permanently lucrative. Why could not
the like partnership be formed between the inventor and the man
of executive talent everywhere? Each man of thought is surrounded
by wiser men than he, if they cannot write as well. Cannot he
and they combine? Talents supplement each other. Beaumont and
Fletcher and many French novelists have known how to utilize such
partnerships. Why not have a larger one, and with more various
members?

Housekeepers say, "There are a thousand things
to everything," and if one must study all the strokes to
be laid, all the faults to be shunned in a building or work of
art, of its keeping, its composition, its site, its color, there
would be no end. Butthe architect, acting under a necessity
to build the house for its purpose, finds himself helped, he knows
not how, into all these merits of detail, and steering clear,
though in the dark, of those dangers whichmight have shipwrecked
him....

I recall these few selected facts, none of them of
much independent interest, but symptomatic of the times and country.
I please myself with the thought that our American mind is not
now eccentric or rude in its strength, but is beginning to show
a quiet power, drawn from wide and abundant sources, proper to
a Continent and to an educated people. If I have owed much to
the special influences I have indicated, I am not less aware of
that excellent and increasing circle of masters in arts and in
song and in science, who cheer the intellect of our cities and
this country today-whose genius is not a lucky accident, but normal,
and with broad foundation of culture, and so inspires the hope
of steady strength advancing on itself, and a day without night.